A J's AcadCustomisng

Many sites have Lisp sections but the following sites have a major Lisp component:-

www.cadpanel.com *A new interesting AutoCad site by a guy who has written books in Farsi. Has Autolisp (good! all his own work, nice dialog boxes ...see helix with dialog box), cusomizing, tips, bugs and more for A2004.

www.angelfire.com/pa3/autocad The Angelfire unamed site. Go to Autolisp in navbar. Three nice downloads; convert .lsp to html for a website display, vlisp.exe the Windows Autolisp freeware editor and the TextPad AutoLISP syntax file from cadvision.com.

www.afralisp.com/tutor.htm Learn lots about using Autolisp at this top Namibian site. Excellent tutorials, refernces and sample applications all very well commented. See also links to people he holds in regard.

home.netcom.com/~rogh/autolisp Ron Liegh's site.
Learn Autolisp at this top site dedicated to Autolisp. See the sample lisp in particular for line by line explanation of code. See the 15 lessons in particular Lesson 7 Trig Functions that details how you create an acos and asin function (Autolisp only has sin, cos, tan and the one atan).

home.pacifier.com/~nemi Leonid Nemirovsky's Better Than Nothing website
One of Ellen Finklestein's recommended links and now one of mine. His own AutoLisp routines and good Autocad tips. Some of his tips I like are here.

www.oocities.org/cadgurucool Cad Guru Cool (see also wwww.cadadvance.com).
Original lisps. See the the one key Q.lsp that issues 12 commands and won a Cadalyst award.

www.digitalcad.com Click on Lisp Routines in the left nav bar for useful Autolisp routines well described by their authors.

acadalisptrng/index.html Index of AcadLispTrng folder.
See also..
acadthreads/index.html Index of AcadThreads folder. Make 2D and 3D Threads with its tutorials on to make spirals and helixs and how to run Autolisp called by the ACAD and MDT Thread section of the MDT page. *Includes CadTutor community page with basic commands and script to make a coil and fuccro's lisps.

acadlispvba/index.html Index of AcadLispVBA folder. Intended to highlight interaction of Autolisp(VisualLisp?) and VBA.

acadsheetmetal/index.html Awaiting a home after evaluation. At present this call is in Autocad, Customizing, and MDT.

acadalispvisual/lets_get_visual.html A Bill Kramer agust 1998 Cadenseweb article (no images) detailing what Visual Lisp is why allowing me to understand that it is more a developers tool and why I will avoid it and stay with Autolisp for the present.

There are no dedicated Autolisp forums but the closest is things are:-
(Note: Please don't bother the comp.lang.lisp people who have nothing to do with Autolisp.)

Google's comp.cad.autocad comp.cad.autocad and to a lesser extent alt.comp.cad is the preferred meeting place of some very competant autolisp programmers and enthuisiasts who work to promote and sustain Autolisp.

discussion.autodesk.com/../ Autodesk's Autocad Customization Discussion Group. A selection option after choosing the AutoCad Discussion Group (ie 'forum'). File uploads allowed.

Script files (.scr extension) allow Autocad commands to be written as a text file and can be executed to do initial drawing setup, drawing, plotting, or to generate slide shows with drawings or rendered images for example. Programming skills are not required, if you can execute the sequence of commands at the command line to achieve an objective, you can enter them in a text file once then you (or others using it) can run the file any number of times with a few strokes at the command line or with a click on a button for example.
In the script use ; for a comment line, DELAY n000 and RSCRIPT to repeat the script again.
Save your MYSCRIPT.SCR into the MDT (or ACAD 200X if not running Mechanical Desktop) folder, use SCR(IPT) or Tools>Run Script to start a script.
If repeating with RSCRIPT, use ESC to stop the repeating thence RESUME to get it going again.
I find if I just repeat the Script command after an ESC I have to do it twice because a spurious R occurs in the first line of the script the first time after ESC which does not occur the second time.
acadscripts/forum_scrips/forum_scripts.txt From comp.cad forum. Note the escape/cancel options to allow user to stop the script then press enter to continue. Note loading a script from Explorer.
acadscripts/make_layer/constr.scr My simple example script to make a layer named constr (short for construction) with an orange color and set it current.

homepage.dtn.ntl.com/terry.rawkins/acad/solids/index.htm Terry Rawkins. See scripting section and using Excel for formula based profiles. homepage.dtn.ntl.com/terry.rawkins/acad/solids/scripts/sol-fun.html ** From this page I learned how to change my views in Autocad with the same facility I have in MDT eg 8 [Enter] for South East, 88 [Enter] for South West, 5 for Plan etc **. This page details Terry's 'PSS' (Parametric Solid Scripts) approach which uses on Autolisp file, sol-fun.lsp (solids functions?..fun?) which contains a number of routines in six catagories that can be driven from the key board or with scripts to produce 3D solid models. He has a philosophy of solids modelling that permits making changes later. This capacity to be able alter a model due to good management of the components in non-parametric vanilla Autocad leads to the use of the term 'Parametric Solids System'.
Note: Terry uses TextPad 4 to build his website and the html is pure and would take CSS with little effort. He uses frames which I do not like which means the url up in the browser stays the same whatever page you are in. To be able to refer (link to) to a particular page I right-click on the page, select properties and copy paste the url off the dialog box.
Also Note: He uses * in place of spaces and c/r (for 'carraige return) on the ends of lines to signify [Enter] to make the script more readable. eg ZOOM*E**.7Xc/r
See more references to Terry's modelling approach in Index of AcadScript folder.

www.upfrontezine.com/tailor/tailor19.htm Ralph Grabowski's Tailoring AutoCAD #19 How to Write a Script File.
acadscripts/grabowsky/scripting.html My local version. Has reminders about:-
1. Running a script from within a script and...
2. Writing a text file from the DOS command line ie.
C:\> copy con filename.scr
;This is the script file
line 1,1 2,2
circle 2,2 1,1

www.multi-batch.com
Engineering Graphics in NSW, Australia. Has some good scripted products. Website html needs tweaking. (Patrick posted in a forum discussion.)

Index of AcadScript folder Includes user postings, some detail of Terry Rawkins lisp/script solid modelling approach and other resources.

csanet.org/newsletter/spring97/nl059711.html How Archaeologists record block faces and whole blocks using Autocad command sytax for scripting. Word search and replace used to put Autocad commands in place when necessary. Use of Word to dump the spreadsheets in to create the comma delimited file. Good read. Pic of block with data.

sgilogo/index.html Index Of SGI Logo Folder. Awaiting a home after evaluation. At present this call is in Autocad, Customizing (script), MDT and Rhino (where it all started because a tut link went dead.

Dialog Control Language (DCL) is used to make custom dialog boxes for AutoLisp programs.

With the advent of vba and arg files some writers responding to marketing hype predicted the demise of autolisp and dcl. This has not proven to be the case and practitoners could have told them so had they been asked.

Skilled practitoners are not particularly interested in dialog boxes and DCL has always been difficult to work with, however the philosopy and method of creating a visual interface as used in vba (the IDE or Integrated Development Enviroment) has resulted in at least two convenient programs, Visual DCL and Object DCL, being available which permit dialogue boxes to be created for autolisp routines without without having to learn DCL.

www.cadvantage.com CadVantage. To download an Autolisp tutorial (108kB unzips to 127kB) and the associated Visual DCL tutorial (114kB unzips to 137kB) (See listing below to download Visual DCL). At Cadvantage you can download introductory tutorials for a range of cad, graphics and web related packages and topics (..see main listing in 2D Tutorials and referred to again in Making A Windows Help File section).

Note:-
1. Good VBA tutorial in Autocad's Help Directory (p369 of vbadev.pdf).
2. Recommended book, AutoCad 2000 VBA (Joe Sutphin -Amazon.com). Publisher www.wrox.com. You can download all the code from their programming books.

A VBA recorder for AutoCad like Excel has!

www.cadbow.com/products.php
CADBow. Download page for Excel-like VBA Macro recorder for AutoCAD. Cost is US$20 and you can download a demo version from this page. If you would like to know how to get into VBA in AutoCad this is a good way to start and fun too! Ver 2 released Apr 02.

www.afralisp.com
Click on VBA and follow Kenny Rammage's work, Randal Rath's tutorials and other good stuff.

www.cadalyst.com CADALYST -Cad magazine and resource.
Their archieved downloads include useful AutoLisp and VBA code. I downloaded FancyText.dvb (Michael Hunter's 4 lessons) from this site. Bugwatch Bugs, work arounds, useful tips and information.

www.contractcaddgroup.com Contract Cad Group (VBA Downloads)
Downloads for AutoCAD VBA, Intellicad VBA, Solidworks VB.

www.brbowen.com/VBA.htm Barry R Bowen Associates.
AutoLISP and AutoCad guru who taught at University and has written many articles. A neat collation of links to articles. One article compares AutoLISP and VBA code side along side. His (June 99) Cadalyst article is on loading and running a VBA project using an AutoLISP routine, while the VBA project itself (see July 99 Cadalyst), sends AutoCad attribute values to an Excel spreadsheet.

Explanation of how to write VBA code in application A that works in application B.

Quote from Barry R Bown's (link above) July Cadalyst article:- "To begin, start AutoCAD and open the VBA editor then click on the Tools menu and pick References. From the list of references available in the Reference dialog box, choose Microsoft Excel 8.0 Object Library (ie excel8.olb), then click the check box. This makes Excel’s methods and properties available to your VBA code. Select OK to close the dialog and begin writing the VBA code."

www.activedwg.com Active Dwg.
Good site for VBA and AutoCAD. Click on AutoCad then see Toolbar Customising (including example of Button link to VBA). See the 50 Quickies (very useful tips). See the detailed tutorial on use of the right-click button (many screen shots). I downloaded many small VBA projects that are both useful utilities and can be studied to help learn VBA.

jtbworld.vze.com Jimmy Bergmark's JTB World.
Good Lisp, AutoLisp and VBA examples for downloading and learning. See Aream.lsp for area of an enclosed object, Design Center start up code and Internet Explorer Tips 'n Tricks
** Also listed in the A2004 Information section of the Autocad page (..may need listing in Design Center section of Autocad page for the Design Center start up code).
He uses Microsoft Front Page 4.0 and all feature syle Articles are in Sweadish and PDF.

www.cadalog.com
CAD shareware (some freeware). Forums. Parts drawings. Lots of useful lisp. A lot happening
Seem like good people. See their new open source area ..all free to down load.

kwik-mcad.scriptmania.com.
Kent Keller frequent contributer to MDT and other ADesk forums.
(MCAD VBA ..rare!) Lisp code for button and command line VBA linking.

www.gcaug.com/per_menu_jclauson.htm Greater Chicargo AutoCad Users Group. Personal Menus presentation.
A very good point form synopsis of how to create personal menus and the traps. Meant to be a summary of a presentation at a club meeting, it provides for me, an excellent structured overview into which I can place various other information I read about that would normally just get jumbled in my head.
acadcust/personal_menus/gcaug_personal_menus.html My local file.

www.markcad.com/autocad/acadtoolbars.htm Mark Middlebrook's page stateing case against using AutoCad's TOOLBAR dialog box for customising toolbars and demonstrating his 'personal menu' method which is Partial Menus (which can be used for all customising ..not just toolbars). Applies equally to R14,A2000/A2002.
Summary of objections to using TOOLBAR dialog box for customising toolbars include:
Not intuitive. Invents .bmp file names and can put them in wrong directory (smiley faces). AutoCAD modifies the MNS (menu source) file, which is derived from the MNU (menu template) file. If you later customize and then compile the MNU file, any Toolbars dialog customization changes get overwritten. When you drag and drop buttons onto toolbars, it's not clear which menu files you're modifying. As a result, you end up with a mish-mash of standard and custom AutoCAD support files.
www.markcad.com/autocad/acadmenus.htm His Menu Customization Tips page.

www.upfrontezine.com/tailor/tailor01.htm
Menu of all of UpFront-eZine's customising topics (ie "tailoring").
www.upfrontezine.com
Home for all of Ralph Grabowski's web pages including the Canadian Autocad Newsletter (back issues archieved and viewable on-line), MS Visio and CAD for Linus Users.

www.onset.com.au A site with some customising tips of interest to me.
Onset Design Pty. Ltd. in Melbourne, Australia. See the Tips section. They suggest using of Partial Menus.

xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/docs/winmenu.htm
Partial Menus, Toolbars and accelerator keys. Good summary and examples.
Reini Urban is known for his lisp work. Note that his 'static' pages are updated infrequently now as he is transfering over time to his new AcadWiki site. See entry in the Autolisp section.

www.satelephone.com/~adee/aaa Adee's AutoCad Answers
Some good links, tips and articles. Heavy use of pdf. (link duplicated in pdf section of MDT page). The character of this site has changed somewhat. It is now 100% pdf and I don't have the patience to explore it on my slow internet link.

www.cadenceweb.com/1999/0699/circles0699.html Lynn Allen's June 1999 Article. If you'd like your image menu to display text but no icon, you can get that to occur by putting a space in front of the text string:-
[ Erase Everything]^C^Cerase; all;;
To launch another icon menu from within the image tile menu, it might look like this (note space again):-
[ Electrical symbols]$I=ICON _ELEC $I=*

Creating your own linetypes are covered in the Customization Guide section of the HELP system. Also, if you have the Express Tools, there's a handy utility (MKLType) for automating the process. There's also a utility (MKShape) for creating shapes for use in complex linetypes. I've used both with good success. See also the Processes section of www.dotsoft.com (listed in main AutoCad section above).

acadcust/fn_keys/link_fn_key.html.
A detailed example found in a user forum. A stub lisp program is written and the connected to [Shft] [F9]. All lines of lisp and and acad.mns changes presented as distinctively coloured and indented code that can be copy pasted into place. Excellent. Use browser backbutton to return.

acadcust/fn_keys/redefining_f1_key.html.
A detailed example found in a Tip iat www.archidigm.com. and developed a little. Starts by modifying F1 to stop Help coming up when you accidently press it while using the nearby Esc/Cancel key then sets up Help to work off Ctrl and F1. F6 is then allocated to a different purpose than it presently is and to gie contrast some changes are made to the acad.pgp file. Good stuff. Use browser backbutton to return.

To be able to make additional Windows based Help files would be very useful considering the number of Windows based applications. It's normally hard to do but a UK shareware product, EasyHelp, provides a useful method. Its actually just a MS Word template and you can select it instead of 'Professional Memo' or whatever. Whatever you can do in Word you can do in your created help file, like bullets, lists, pictures and hyperlinks between different parts for example.

You do not have to be in the application to access the created help files. This independance leaves options for working with both specially created help files and the application in double windows (using the Task Bar or otherwise) in a tutorial type of approach.

www.cadalyst.com/solutions/alispsols/1001als/1001als.htm Making Windows Help Files the Easy Way
Cadalyst Oct 2001 article by Tony Hotchkiss, Ph.D., P. Eng., Associate Professor of CAD/CAM/CAE at the State University of New York College.

www.eon-solutions.com Eon Solution Ltd (UK). To download EasyHelp Ver 3.1 (3.7/8.5Mb), the MS Word template referred to by Tony Hotchkiss in the Help File article above.

www.cadvantage.com CadVantage. See Creating Help files With Microsoft Help Workshop which you can download from his site. (Site main listing in 2D Tutorials and referred to again in the Customising -Miscellaneous for using Visual DCL to make dialog boxes in Autolisp routines.

acadhelpadditions/acadhelpmodify.html For a local copy of a posting on how to add html files to AutoCad Help.
Note: Although much of the information in this local file is acknowleged as coming from the AutoCad Help file, the truth is I can find no references to it in the Help files of A2002. The poster's signiture specifies his equipment as Win 2000 and A2000 and it all is detailed in AutoCad 2000 Help. Presumably it will work fine in A2002 and they were just losing the plot with Today (I note Today was dropped in AutoCad 2004).

Reinit to reload a changed pgp file (eg acad.pgp) instead of exiting from, say, AutoCad and re-starting.

Support_Custom (Support_My)? Folder ('Personal Menus')
to be used, put in file path and a separate file copy retained for all customising. I'm sure some argue keeping it outside of the AutoCad program files. Requires at least:-

includes/popupwin.js ?? JavaScrip .should it be a section of Acadcustom.html. What calls this or is it an orphan. Get rid of or keep. Look at Include folder just above it ..actually css for this or something else? Again keep it or get rid of?

Aussie John's Site Page Last Updated And Links Checked: 20 July 2003

AutoCAD Customising